In online education, nobody knows you’re a dog.

The above, of course, is one of the most famous New Yorker cartoons of all time. The discussion on this post has made me realize that the same principle behind that cartoon applies to online education too.

Over at that post, me an Historyguy were discussing the Margaret Soltan argument that students can take your tests for you and the professor will never know. He writes:

You raise a valid point about not being able to guarantee that students are doing their own work. I suppose it is possible that a friend, a partner, etc. could be a phantom student. However, this would take an extremely large commitment on the part of that person to complete all of the work required to receive a high grade in our courses. Just doing an assignment or two wouldn’t really work, as a notable variation in the quality or character of a student’s work would be just as much a tip off to a professor at an online university as at a traditional institution. I don’t believe that students turning in work done by others is any less of a problem at traditional institutions as it is in online institutions (I should know, based on many years teaching in both settings).

I probably would have written the same thing in his position. In fact, putting the shoe on the other foot for a moment, he is certainly right about this kind of cheating at traditional universities. Have you ever heard of Ed Dante? That’s the pseudonym of a guy who wrote a devastating piece last year for the Chronicle about life working in a college student paper mill. [He's interviewed in a recent Lapham's podcast that I've been meaning to listen to, but haven't gotten there yet.] What’s clear from his story is that if somebody with enough resources wants to cheat in your class, they can do so.

The best defense I can muster against that kind plagiarism is that I assign almost all of my papers in stages: proposal, draft, second draft, etc. It’s not just that people who cheat tend to do so at the last second.  It’s, as Historyguy suggests, that you can get a feel for changes in the quality or character of a student’s work that way. The problem though is this: If I think someone is turning in someone else’s work (and I can’t find the original using Google), I can call them in and ask them questions about it to see if they fess up. If I’m in Colorado and they’re in Massachusetts, that’s not going to happen.

More importantly, the whole gold rush mentality of American online education discourages people who participate in this system from doing anything about cheating, assuming they can pick up on it at all. And if students are feckless enough to pay people to write whole papers from scratch for them, they’re certainly capable of paying people to take entire online classes for them too. While looking for a post at College Misery about a Craigslist ad soliciting customers along those lines which I remember from a few months back, I accidentally found four more. This problem is sitting right under the online education movement’s nose.  My problem is that nobody associated with this practice seems to care.

On the other side of the equation, I’m not sure if I’m answering Dan Allosso’s question, “Can they stop us from teaching online?,” in the way he intended, but how can well-meaning online students know whether their professor is actually a dog? While there are obviously many competent and dedicated online instructors out there, the beneficiaries of the online education gold rush have no incentive to check their credentials. Like MfD says in the same string of comments, “for-profit” might be the primary problem here, but if I’m in Colorado and you’re in Australia performing due diligence when I’m hiring you isn’t exactly easy. It’s like the contingent faculty problem at traditional universities writ large.  At least with adjuncts, the department chair might visit your classes once a year.  At my university, the online education arm (as it currently stands) that teaches history classes that way isn’t even in my department.

Perhaps tenure would be a tremendous boon to the quality of online education as it would incentivize instructors to take their pedagogical responsibilities as seriously as Historyguy obviously does, but I’m afraid that one of the primary reasons that administrations everywhere seem so keen on online education these days is to get around tenure in the first place.  I bet tenure arrives in the for-profit sector of online education about the same time that dogs start frequenting chat rooms.

More information than you require.

I’ve been walking the Freedom Trail all day today, so this is the first chance that I’ve had to link to something I wrote far too early in the morning last week for the Historical Society’s blog. If you haven’t seen it yet, my subject is (once again) teaching the history survey course without a textbook.

If you’re coming here from there, let me add that my inspiration for killing my textbook was, of course, Historiann and the readings that I’ve replaced the textbook with come from Milestone Documents. I didn’t want to drop names or sound like an ad over at the Historical Society blog because I preferred to sell the idea of the non-textbook survey class as a worthy goal in and of itself. Therefore, I thought I’d use this space to give credit where credit is due.

I want to add that these online reading assignments in no way contradict my newfound calling as an online education Quaker since at first blush you may think otherwise. Using online resources is not the same thing as teaching a course entirely online. The Internet is a wonderful thing, as long as its used responsibly. Consider this report on a new survey about college students and online texts from Nick Carr. While students prefer paper books to e-texts (thank God), a graduate student in the social sciences wrote:

I answered that I prefer print books, generally. However, the better answer would be that print books are better in some situations, while e-books are better in others. Each have their role – e-books are great for assessing the book, relatively quick searches, like encyclopedias or fact checking, checking bibliography for citations, and reading selected chapters or the introduction.

In short, if you have to assign e-readings, short documents are the best way to do it. Indeed, large textbooks are often so awful that I have to imagine that they would be the only instance I could cite where an e-version would actually be better, but separate documents are better still.

I’ve also found it interesting that this post about the possibility of compulsory online education has gotten a lot of attention. I’ll try to do a follow-up tomorrow night if another trip to Lowell tomorrow doesn’t wear me out entirely. Then I’ll fly home, crawl back under my rock and try to finish the two books I want done before school starts again.

The power of place.

Perhaps my favorite part of these TAH teacher trips is when we do what I affectionately refer to as dog-and-pony shows at major American archives. In the last five years or so, the archivists and curators at places like the Franklin Institute, the California Historical Society and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin have gone into their collections and brought out documents and objects to offer our teachers a sophisticated version of show and tell.

I’ve been through the dog-and-pony show at the Massachusetts Historical Society three times now, and it definitely gets the best reaction of any of those places. To be fair though, not all of those places have centuries old copies of the Declaration of Independence. This, for example, is the Dunlap broadside printing of the Declaration made up right after it was signed and read aloud to annonce independence:

A few years ago, Norman Mailer bought a similar version of that document for nine and a half million dollars. If you want to see one-of-a-kind documents, here is the original copy of the Abigail Adams letter in which she asks her husband to “remember the ladies”:

These pictures are just some of many that students post on their blogs, and one of the great things about blogging these trips* is that students can pull pictures from each other, just as I’ve done here. I’m not sure there have ever been so many pictures from a dog-and-pony show as I’ve seen from the one at MHS in the last few weeks. Maybe it’s the age of the documents or maybe it’s just the fact that it’s the Declaration of Independence they’re seeing.

But I have a confession to make: a few original documents don’t do that much for me. After all, MHS has been good enough to put up an awful lot of the best stuff from its collections online. I could get the ideas from these important documents at home in Colorado if I were so inclined. I like these days because of the look on the teachers faces when they see these documents rather than from the documents themselves.

Lest you think I’m totally jaded, I did get that look on my face myself a few days ago. After covering Lexington and Concord for the second time, we made an unscheduled stop at Walden Pond for what was my first visit there:

Certainly, the photo isn’t particularly impressive (as it was pouring rain at the time we were there, and, by the way, who knew you could swim in it?). I think what got me is that I knew exactly what happened there. Heck, I have about two pages of my current manuscript on the icecutters who bothered Thoreau when he stayed along its shores. That’s why I bought myself a Henry David Thoreau t-shirt despite the fact that my wife keeps telling me that I have far too many t-shirts already.

While there is no question that I prefer Thoreau to Jefferson in the great scheme of things, I think my differing reaction is more a testament to the power of place than anything else. Documents are fragile things, but place is forever. People put up plaques to events in the place where they happened even if the buildings that they happened in have already been lost. I’m used to culling ideas from the world’s great archives, but if it’s not Colorado history that I’m dealing with I usually have to get on an airplane to see where the stories I’m telling happened with my own eyes. Sometimes I get that feeling when I walk into a particularly good library, but usually I have to be let into the stacks to partake of the full effect.

Maybe it’s the sense of discovery that gets me. The unfamiliar rather than the familiar is what allows me to be thoroughly surprised. Or perhaps I’ve just been spending too much time around Boston lately.

* If you want to read some of our teachers’ work, click at the above link and tool around in the blogroll there.

Can they make you teach online?

That question comes from a conversation my illustrious department chairman and I were having while driving up to Denver International Airport for our second ten-day stint in a row showing teachers historic sites around Boston. The reason he asked me that was apprehension we both have over a distance education summit on our campus that our Provost has called in a few short weeks. The Provost has offered no hints of anything he might be springing on our campus, but I hope you can understand why I might be worried. After all, thanks to the Internet, I can be replaced by starving historians worldwide! And thanks to American labor law, I have next to no rights at work (but then again, you don’t have any either so I guess it’s all good).

That last bit is the reason that I eventually answered Matt’s question in the affirmative. I seem to remember stories of people being switched from American to World History classes just to encourage them to retire. I think forced online teaching could work the same way. After all, if they can eliminate your job by eliminating your department without declaring financial exigency, telling you that you have to teach online might actually seem like an improvement from your perspective.

What seems a more likely course of action, if not at my university then at universities in general, would be that faculty would be given an option to teach online. If you don’t accept that option, then the extra work would be farmed out to starving historians elsewhere. Anything else would be like leaving money on the table to them. Seriously, I think the problem with higher education today is that the average university president has adopted the same attitude towards their work as Ivan Boesky c. 1985. When you can’t tell the difference between public and for-profit education, I think it’s the public universities that have the bigger problems.

So perhaps the better question here would be, “Should they make you teach online?” I think you know already that my answer is “no.” Where do I start with reasons? It’s often dull, there’s no security against cheating, it usually does nothing to foster critical analysis, etc. But Ivan Boesky wouldn’t care about such trivialities. All he’d want to know is whether it would make any money.

However, I say “no” on those grounds too. The internet has disrupted many established in its relatively short history. However, in most cases those industries have suffered because it was possible to build a better mousetrap. Someone give me one advantage of online education from an educational standpoint. No, the ability to learn while still in your pajamas doesn’t count because that’s not educational.

If all the financial benefits of online education continue to flow to the university and the students continue to get no educational benefit from the endeavor, this whole house of cards simply won’t last in the long run. The students are going to demand a better education because employers are going to demand better educated graduates.

So I think I’m going to become a conscientious objector – an online education Quaker.* If there’s ever a draft, I’ll go to prison because I don’t want to participate in a system that’s misguided at best and inherently corrupt at worst. Unfortunately, war sometimes makes leaders do stupid things. Here’s hoping our university’s leaders are only at the preparedness stage.

* This doesn’t mean I’m opposed to online elements in face-to-face courses, what we call “hybrid courses” on my campus. I think the Internet should supplement existing classes, not replace them

Best. Sign. Ever.

Spotted near the Lowell National Historic Park in lovely Lowell, MA:

What do you think? 1955? 1945? Sorry I can’t take a better picture with my Blackberry, but I think you can see that the mule’s legs light up in sequence to show it kicking.

Do you dig graves?

Neil: Yeah, they’re alright.

I never thought I dug graves until I spent some time in a seventeenth century graveyard in downtown Salem, Massachusetts with my friend Tad Baker. Those graves offer a terrific window into society long past, but I’ve come to realize once again that I have absolutely no interest in ever being buried under one.

Longtime readers (are there any?) will know I’ve already expressed this sentiment before after reading River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit as a result of Flora Muybridge (Edweard Muybridge’s estranged wife) ending up in a mass grave in a scruffy field behind a California multiplex. But what happens to you and your headstone even if you aren’t reburied near a shopping mall? Yes, if you made it to the town cemetery in Salem, people like me will visit your headstone, but what exactly does that headstone look like after all these years?

It might look like this:

Yes, some graves were just markers and we’re supposed to have writing on them but that one in the back is awfully big for that, don’t you think? I figured those markers would look more like this [Notice the dried up leaf there for perspective - Yes, I meant to do that]:

If you and twenty other people are buried under that, what’s the point? Nobody will ever know it’s you down there. To make matters worse, according to Tad, the headstones at this particular graveyard have been moved around several times by nineteenth century people who really liked order.

Suppose you were a rich Puritan, and you got one of those expensive graves. This is the headstone of one of the Salem witchcraft judges:

Less than four hundred years later and someone has to help you out by encasing the thing in cement! Four hundred years is not a lot of time in the great scheme of things, people. You can’t fight erosion; you can only postpone the inevitable. That’s why this grave is the one that cracks me up the most:

That’s the grave of Salem Witchcraft victim George Jacobs, discovered in the 1950s during the construction of a local shopping mall and reburied in the Nurse family graveyard on the Rebecca Nurse (another victim of the hysteria) Homestead maybe ten or fifteen years ago. The funny thing about that twentieth century Puritan headstone is that in a couple of hundred years nobody is going to be able to tell the difference between it and the Puritan original. Unfortunately, the Nurse Homestead is maintained by the Danvers Alarm Company, the shakiest of non-profit groups staffed entirely by volunteers. They’re really nice people and I wish them the best, but I’m afraid that the twenty acres of suburban Boston upon which that graveyard is located will eventually become the sight of another shopping mall.

Hardcore Unitarian that I am, I really don’t know much about the religious reasons for headstones or burial in graveyards at all, but I do know this: All is vanity, people. All is vanity.

A bleg about blogs.

At the moment I’m in Salem, Massachusetts, working on a TAH grant for a group of teachers from Wyoming. What’s funny about this is job that it’s the first historical thing I’ve ever done where I am not primarily identified as the historian. I’m actually the tech guy, the one who explains to all of them the wonders of blogging their trip to the greater Boston area. It’s not as if I know nothing about the colonial or revolutionary eras, but I’d probably be the last guy doing this job if it weren’t for the fact that I understand WordPress.

If you know anything about TAH grants, you know that travel grants have a very bad reputation. Send a bunch of teachers on vacation on the government’s dime! Somewhere, Paul Ryan is very upset. If you were standing at the North Bridge in Concord yesterday, listening to the ranger describe the position of the two armies before the firing of the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, you would see the value of place for understanding history. Still, blogging is an excellent way to make sure that there is serious academic rigor to work like this.

Each of the teachers has a blog. [If you want to see their work, you can visit the blogroll at our class blog here. Each name links to the blog of one of the teachers.] We ask them to reflect on what they saw each day on their blog (emphasizing the utility of their information in their classroom) and to read other teacher’s reflections and comment. This is my fifth year doing this and it has so far worked very nicely. In fact, I believe that blogging is one of the reasons that our grants get funded in what has been a brutally competitive TAH environment.

Last semester, I brought blogging to a regular 14-week semester class for the first time, and I don’t think it worked so well. Unlike the trips, where there has been considerable conversation in the comments despite the teachers’ late hours, with graduate students back home comments were like pulling teeth. I really think there is great value in assigning different kinds of writing, so I want to bring a class blog to at least one of my undergraduate courses next semester, but I want to do it right this time.

So, people who use blogs in regular face-to-face 14 week classes, what do I need to know to do it right? Do you just have one blog or do you make every student get their own? How do you get students to read other students’ work? What percentage of the grade should be based upon the blog?

Inquiring minds want to know.

PS Why the picture? My next post here is going to be about graves. Stay tuned.

Why higher ed is like the Northern Pacific Railroad.

I’ve been reading Richard White’s new book, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. It’s probably about a hundred pages too long, but it’s definitely path breaking. I swear I’ll never be able to look at a railroad the same way agin. His argument breaks the usual dichotomy between Robber Barons and empire builders by arguing that the railroad tycoons of the late nineteenth century were simply incompetent, that they had to rely on price-gouging and corruption because they knew absolutely nothing about how to run railroads.

There’s also another really interesting point about railroads that runs throughout the book. Just because you can build a railroad that reaches the Pacific doesn’t mean that you should build a railroad that reaches the Pacific. The Northern Pacific is an excellent example of this phenomenon. When Jay Cooke started building the Northern Pacific from Duluth to the coast during the 1870s, there were not enough people in Montana and beyond in order to generate the traffic needed to pay for the debt that got the railroad built in the first place. That’s why they had to resort to the kind of ridiculous promotion above. By the way, they didn’t work. “If you build it, they will come,” only works for Kevin Costner.

White mentions somewhere in this giant tome that he was inspired by the dot.com bubble and living in Silicon Valley to write this book the way he did. Reading it, and blogging about what I tend to blog about, I couldn’t help but thinking about higher ed. No, I’m not going back on my pronouncement about what other people have taken to calling “the education bubble.” No matter how expensive higher education gets, students still have a reasonable expectation of getting a good return on their investment over the course of their lifetime. [Just because you're unemployed when you leave college doesn't mean that state will be permanent. The recession will end some day. Really!] I couldn’t help but think there are parallels between duping farmers onto bad land in anticipation of future riches, and duping students into online and for-profit colleges for the short-term gains of dubious investors.

I’ll skip the for-profit parallels for now because with what they spend on advertising the comparison is way too easy. I’ll go in the other direction because I found this great example of online education charlatanism through my Twitter feed this morning:

The bubble is financial: tuitions rising significantly each year despite economic conditions and students taking on student loan debt they then cannot pay off. It is practical: the degree no longer guaranteeing a job and a majority of employers saying that college graduates lack the skills for today’s marketplace. It is cultural: college professors in four-year colleges traditionally educating “for life, not for a specific job” even though today’s college students need job-related education. It is economic: the nature of work in a knowledge economy requiring skills unlike those of graduates of just 15 years ago. It is institutional: a professoriate confronted with so many changes and demands with insufficient background or support to make changes beyond their ken or abilities. The question, “Is college worth it?” has gained a currency that should be troubling to college and university administrators.

It strikes me that there’s some confusion here about what exactly is bubbling: Are students investing in college the same way that flippers used to buy up Las Vegas real estate or is it the colleges themselves with unreasonable expectations of an infinite supply of students in order to keep their books balanced? The railroad comparison takes care of that confusion. Only the for-profits are looking for a quick buck. The colleges are simply looking for easy answers and those answers don’t get much easier than sending every course you can online.

Begin by claiming that the sky is falling:

“The learning theory that fit so well in our culture and with the dominant technology pre-1995 (print-based and paper-based technologies), now is not working very well for any of us, so we have to change. Each of you on campus has sincerely and devotedly committed yourselves fully to learning, but now we know that our learning epistemology is less and less appropriate. This is not your fault; it is simply a time of incredible human growth; it is a time of rapid evolution in our culture; a time of re-shaping our economy. We must transform or become irrelevant.”

Add something about rain following the plow and minus the pre-1995 part, and I bet the people who ran the Northern Pacific thought pretty much the same thing. Just because the future might be now does not necessarily mean that you can make a huge profit from it (unless perhaps you’re Amazon.com, but that’s another story).

I’ve already explained why I think online education is an inferior good in the economic sense. This ties back to what I take away from White’s point about railroads: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do something. There will always be a market for quality face-to-face education because it has a proven track record of improving job prospects and setting students up for a bright future. Dilute that product with an inferior good (especially an inferior good that can be four times as expensive as the original) and you will eventually go into receivership.

Higher education is still a bargain. Turn it into the 21st century equivalent of a farm in Montana* and it won’t be for long.

* Anybody read Collapse? Anybody?

“Because I say so.”

Now that summer is in high gear, is it OK to blog about our students since we know they can’t possibly be reading this? Granted he’s not blogging since he writes for the New Yorker, but Louis Menand seems to think it’s OK to tell stories out of school. Even though this may be the new “Higher Education Is Dying” magnum opus of the week, it’s this personal touch at the beginning that I liked most:

My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.

At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities….

Soon after I started teaching there, someone raised his hand and asked, about a text I had assigned, “Why did we have to buy this book?” I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?”

Menand thinks that last question was designed to jumpstart a philosophical discussion about the reasons people go to college. I, who by now have probably been teaching at that second kind of university longer than Menand ever did, would classify that question as plain old whining, probably because that particular novel was either too long, too boring or perhaps both. Call me a monster, but my response to that question would have been “Because I say so.” You don’t have to like what I make you read (indeed, if you critique it systematically and intelligently I’ll give your paper an “A” in a heartbeat), but you have to take it seriously.

When I got my lower-tier Ivy League undergraduate education, we at least had the common sense not to deliberately antagonize our professors by putting our anti-intellectualism on display for all of them to see. Unlike Menand, I know they don’t want to do the reading. Still, I believe there has to be some amount of compulsion in education. If there’s not, your students walk all over you and, worse yet, get a lot less out of the class than they would have otherwise.

I think this same principle applies to attendance policies. A couple of weeks ago, I went to our Provost’s “Student Retention Summit.” I wasn’t planning to say anything, but everyone else’s comments made me curious about something so I polled the room on this question: “How many of you make attendance mandatory for passing the course?” It turns out me and a guy from math were the only ones. The way I frame it, this doesn’t mean you have to attend every class. In a fourteen-week class that meets three times per week, I’ll give them four absences without asking for sickness, acts of God or whatever else they see fit. [Actually it's five, but I put four on the syllabus.] After that, I’ll start taking points off their final grade and at eight I reserve the right to fail students outright regardless of performance in other aspects of the course. In short, attendance is not part of the grade. It’s a pre-requisite for being graded.

After explaining this policy following my poll, one of my colleagues from the scientists explained that he does not require attendance in the same way that I do because performing the functions of the lab are what you are being graded on and if you aren’t there you can’t do them. I have great sympathy for that position, but I’m not sure that many of my students think in those terms. When I first arrived on campus, I asked the Dean of Students at the time whether he thought I should require attendance. He said I should in order “to help them help themselves.” I’ve never gotten the attendance based version of Menand’s question. It might go something like, “Why do I have to show up to class if I write the papers and can pass the tests?” If I did, I’d probably still go with “Because I say so,” because a more polite answer would sound too much like what we tell our 6-year old son when he asks why he needs to eat all of his salad.

I recognize that what I’ve written so far seems a little harsh. It is. But in my own defense I do go to great lengths to explain the value of the books I assign after my students have read them. Also, I almost never have to fail someone solely on the basis of attendance because they fail anyway on other things. Tenured Radical had a really thought-provoking post the other day about whether students are a “captive audience” in the labor law sense of that term. I try really hard not to abuse the power I have in the classroom.

Still, at some point, you have to get down to brass tacks and remember: “I’m the teacher. You’re the student.” If you compromise on everything, they aren’t going to learn anything. After all, you’re teaching at a college, not a Montessori pre-school.